@Buttercup I salute you for doing a job I can’t do, and for injuries received in the line of duty. Deeply sorry it had to happen to you, but glad you’re on the mend. Hope the recovery is very swift and smooth, especially given how rocky the road thus far has been.

@SpilledBeanz Speaking of, this just hit the bboards today:

======================<* 7: Game Announcements - 182 *>======================
Message: 7/182 Posted Author
Old Guard Lounge Sep 30 2024 Cujo

Anyone in the Old Guard Lounge, who did not die IC, that can still log in to their character, can ask to be moved back to the IC grid.

Just put in a request. If you can still log in to your character, and you’re in the Old Guard Lounge, all you have to do is put in a request to get put back IC. If there are people who don’t even have their char passwords just have to ask for them to be updated, and you can get your character back IC then.

All you have to do is a request, and ask. Super simple! super fun time simple, big IC grid awaits.
------------------------------< +bbread 7/182 >-------------------------------

Better go get another carton of Morton’s salt to take this news with. I can smell the selective enforcement from here.

@Buttercup Hopes, love, best wishes, and prayers for you and yours. Hope you not only pull through, but get better faster than anyone expects was possible.

@Zephyr You explained the game’s biggest problems in the best nutshell I’ve seen to date.

@Zephyr said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

It was going to be a clean slate where players could affect the story, and build a new resistance to eventually defeat the Sith. Except that Cujo drove out the people who actually generated roleplay. I don’t just mean the events, but the day to day scenes and little one off fun things that @Ashkuri was so fond of running.

Pity this idea was screwed from the outset, since we all know Aryn wasn’t about to let her pet faction get beaten, ever, and has alts in every faction in a position to sabotage every effort to change this even if Cujo wouldn’t give her whatever she wanted (which he would). This is likely the largest part of why all the activity generators left; in your own words, what was the point?

@Zephyr said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Cujo never saw the importance in the day to day on the game. He and Banshee both argued with me that posts were enough in the main story and people should just be cool with those and RP off what they read, offering no avenue to actually participate in it. They don’t know how to deal with the social side of the game, because everyone on staff now is either antisocial, or hateful.
They poisoned the well, and now they’re shocked that everything is dying.

Antisocial, hateful, or both. Mostly both. And for what it’s worth, it IS dying. I had a look at their logins tonight, and there were 50. But 30 of them were just alts, and at least ten of those were double-connected alts. I suspect at least half of the remaining 20 logins were staff, or staff favorites.

Not a lot of original bits for a supposedly very successful game. And this is AFTER an influx of new players over the last few weeks, at least a few of which were returning players. Once they see (or re-see) the light, I suspect they’ll be gone, too.

And staff will still have learned nothing except what they want to learn.

Edit: I’m sure someone will point out that roughly ten new player logins is a HUGE number of active players these days, and under ordinary circumstances, they’d be right.

But when you factor in players who were already there, that number shrinks to 5-7 new players at most, who most likely flocked to a game that looked HUGE just from its WHO screen.

Under normal circumstances, big WHO screens mean big games, lots of activity, and easily accessible RP. Big WHO screens on AoA mean tons of alts, stagnant activity, and little to no day-to-day RP. The kinds of places players tend to linger on briefly before leaving to find fun elsewhere.

TL:DR? Drain go gurgle, AoA still go round and round.

Edited 'cause afterthought, and didn’t want to reply to myself.

@Warlander Well, I was wrong. I suspected Darth Omen was Banshee’s alt, since a surviving Mace Windu turned to the Sith sounded like Banshee’s wet dream.

But Banshee doesn’t play Darth Omen; Cujo does. I don’t remember this information coming up before now, but it may have; my memory could be a lot better. Just in case it hasn’t, I’ll re-broach the subject now.

@SpilledBeanz For what it may be worth, this hit the boards recently.

=========================<* 8: Game Updates - 221 *>=========================
Message: 8/221 Posted Author
Rise of the New Rebellion Aug 11 2024 Cujo

Greetings, all.

I’m tossing out a bbpost update on the state of the galaxy, as far as the Sith and the Rebellion elements go. The intention, following our previous time jump, was for the game to get a span of time where the clear presence of Sith Empire dominance was displayed. It had been 17 years since the fall of the New Republic, and we wanted to give a sense of hoplessness to the galaxy, that they were under that iron grip, and that the Sith Lords of this new era had refined the ideals that Palpatine and Tarkin had envisioned. We wanted to make it feel like this iteration of the Sith Empire was really pulling it off, with efficiency and intelligence. There are a lot of arguments that can be made that the Galactic Empire really screwed up in a lot of major ways, which lead to its relatively short downfall, and the desire here was to paint a more powerful edge to this Sith Empire, and give it a bit of that regal classic KOTOR-era Sith style too.

So again, the past year and a half of the game was meant to let the game coast on Sith Imperial rule. I’d hope it would yield some good fun for people, to RP staying hidden, staying in the shadows, being the ones on the run, if you are the ones pushing for the freedom of the galaxy from overlords and despots.

But, this is Star Wars, and we can’t stay in a position of total control for too long.

Because of this, if the past 18 years of the IC grid would be labeled something akin to the Reign of the Sith Empire, then my hope for the future going forward would be the era of the Rise of the New Rebellion.

The Rebellion has been building up its mobile shipyard fleet, a massive Mon Calamari shipyard on engines, dubbed the Organa’s Hope. This massive fleet factory is the focus of the future for the game’s story. Being that it is fully operational now, after nearly two decades of planning, and building, it should be considered fully in-play now. With its goal being to discover safe star systems, relatively speaking, that it can hyperspace in to, release its ships out… to go grab all the resources possible, bring them in and churn out a new attack force that can then head out to engage Sith Empire forces. Being that this mobile star base is the future of the New Rebellion, and that it is fully functional at this stage of the game’s story, then those players who wish to create stories around this are encouraged to do just so. We can tell you where the Organa’s Hope is located, and what its current goals are. It will be ICly producing fleets to attack Sith Empire forces, which will give the Sith Empire players something to react to as well, as they desperately defend their regions, while also trying to find the source of this growing New Rebellion. It is meant to be a high stakes game of cat and mouse, across the galaxy.

Additionally, at this stage, the New Rebellion is meant to formally request Jedi inclusion in their endeavors again. Not to be generals in a war, but to ensure as much of the galaxy affected by this war, are as safe as possible. The New Rebellion wants the Jedi to be there to help keep civilians, and innocents, safe from the Sith, but also from the splash back of war itself.

So in summary, the New Rebellion IS in full operation now. The wars across the galaxy are meant to be amping up, with word of mouth spreading rapidly that the reign of the Sith Empire is now facing its biggest challenge yet. It is the light, pushing back against twenty years of darkness.

I hope this helps, and if you have questions, or want to create stories based on this, just reach out to Staff and we can help you do that. We are here for you to do that. If you want to decide how to shape the galaxy, this is the vessel through which you do that. We want it to be fun, and we want you all to have great stories told here.

Reach out, and we will help.
------------------------------< +bbread 8/221 >-------------------------------

I predicted long ago that the Sith Empire will rule the galaxy until the game closes, so this post came as something of a surprise to me. Maybe the influx of new players was and is a lot lower than Cujo and his pets wanted. Maybe they’re wishing for more people to show off for, and/or they’re getting sick of each other’s company.

I don’t expect things to actually CHANGE there, since the Sith Empire is the favored faction, and the most active as well (not that this means much of anything, since activity outside of scheduled events is largely dead, and there aren’t more than a half-dozen scheduled events per month, at most); over half of all scheduled events these last six months have been ‘Sith Empire and allies’ events. With ‘allies’ meaning Sith subfactions, and mercs and similar independent characters loyal to them.

But this will make it SOUND like something fun and Rebellious just might be happening. Nobody joins a Star Wars game to play a tiny, powerless Rebellion.

Something I’m sure AoA staff and favorites are counting on.

Edit: For what it may also be worth, the post doesn’t actually change anything meaningful, no matter how excitingly and enticingly it may be worded. The supposedly now-fully-operational mobile shipyard was advertised during the timejump as being on the move and largely doing the same things it will be doing now, and the Jedi have been some degree of involved in the New Rebellion/Resistance for most of the time beyond the jump. I’m sure there’s more, but this tells most of the tale. As does the near-total lack of activity from the Resistance/New Rebellion these last few months. The faction is likely losing players and on the verge of dying. Can’t have that; the Sith players need to feel like they’re beating SOMEONE, after all, not a bunch of coded NPC stand-ups.

If you know a little of the game’s history and read between the lines, this post promises only more of the same of what is already happening. Nothing has changed.

(edited because I thought of something else and didn’t want to reply to myself…)

@ThisGuy That ungodly horrible shuttle system is the whole reason I got a ship at all. Seriously, who wants to risk being stranded at the arse-end of the galaxy just 'cause there’s no shuttle going off-world (yes, there were literally worlds that had incoming shuttles, but none going offworld)?

But even with a ship, I still go offworld as little as possible. The coded spaceflight system is a needlessly overcomplicated mess.

@Jax Best. Advice. Ever.

Honestly, I wasn’t planning on trying it, not least 'cause I’m not a newbie there. But boy, would I love to be a fly on the wall in THAT scene!

@EDI7078 Thanks for the heads-up. I’m already playing there, and have been enjoying the place.

@STD Never heard about anyone trying that. IMO, it’s pretty clever. Since it’s never happened to my knowledge, all I can do is speculate; sorry I can’t be more helpful here.

If a new and well-liked member of a staff-favored faction did it, I could see them pulling it off and getting away with it. Maybe more than once.

Someone else doing the same thing might be accepted as a running joke character. Don’t know what they’d do to the player/character if that didn’t happen, though. Winding up with permanently nerfed dice rolls just to keep the ‘loser’ losing comes to mind, since they have no problem spoofing dice rolls for even less reason.

Since cowardice goes against The Way, I doubt such a character would be accepted among the Koras. They might even kill the character themselves. Which, since the Koras are the faction most likely to benefit from such trolling, would probably get a character ostracized or killed for nothing.

@imstillhere And let’s not forget the old ploy of non-Koras (often newbies) in Kora clique scenes being used as blaster fodder while Koras did everything important in the scene, which is at least as bad as staff alts steamrolling the low-level targets. At least the newbies had a chance of being relevant to the scene the other way.

And as for the OTHER thing… gross and vicious doesn’t begin to scratch the surface. I don’t remember witnessing one of those ‘gifts’ being opened, and I’m glad I didn’t, but I’m deeply sorry you had to suffer through that particular horror and humiliation, Zephyr.

Seriously, what normal human being could ever think another person would ever find that anything but sick? On any sane game, with half-ass decent staff, that guy would be GONE.

@Popes I suspect yours is a pretty common experience for a newbie there. They are big on discussing options that don’t involve killing characters, such as capture, or being wounded and incapacitated and then dragged off the field by your friends. Or maybe they realize your health is about gone and stop sending attacks your way. This is more for the benefit of the dinos, who don’t want to lose their borderline maxed-out charbits, but since the cat’s out of the bag now, these benefits are spilling over to newbies as well, to avoid losing PCs after one or two battles.

But you will definitely feel useless in any kind of combat without a weapon with high-end mods to make it useful. Your average stock pistol, the most common weapon for newbies, has an accuracy of around 70 percent, which means you lose almost a third of your skill with the weapon before you even roll your attack. So even a character with a skill level of 100 with pistols would only have a 70 when using one. Combine that with the often high defensive skills of coded NPCs and the generally low skills of new players, and you’re going to miss A LOT. Stock carbines are only slightly better than pistols, and even stock rifles will have 85 percent accuracy at best. Get used to missing a lot more than you hit.

And when you do hit, it’ll often look and feel like flea bites, since most coded NPCs have better stats and armor than new players, and attack roll results play a role in determining damage. Even a high-damage weapon with 90-100 percent accuracy can have its damage cut in half or more by the time rolls and armor are factored in.

When those same NPCs shoot YOU, on the other hand, you’ll KNOW you’ve been shot, for the same reasons as stated above; higher skills, better gear. It’s like a blind puppy trying to fight two ogres waving sticks around; you’re trying to nibble them to death when you can even hit them at all, while they can almost casually whack you just a few times and you’re done for the night.

Doesn’t exactly feel like the movies, does it? By AoA standards, farm boy Luke Skywalker from Episode IV would be a dino char, if his results on the screen are any indication. Made up to actual farm boy stats on the game, he wouldn’t have survived the escape from the Death Star. Not even with a captured Stormtrooper blaster and a lightsaber, and with the Stormtroopers deliberately missing him (Vader and Tarkin WANTED the rescuers to escape, after all).

@GF Some people do go for that sort of tedious keyboarding and waiting to “simulate” flying a starship and loading and unloading coded cargo to earn money.

I don’t think I will ever understand those people. It’s certainly not what I imagine when I think of flying a starship, or when I think of roleplaying. And especially not when I think of FUN.

To each their own, I guess.

@Popes I thought I remembered something about such a bonus straight out of chargen, but I couldn’t remember whose idea that was… it was pretty far back in the thread.

Completely unsurprised that he’d steal your idea. Though genuinely startled that he stole an actual GOOD idea.

@Istus Speaking of inflating player numbers, Cujo is chasing new players HARD ATM. These announcements hit the boards during the wee hours last night:

=========================<* 8: Game Updates - 218 *>=========================
Message: 8/218 Posted Author
Free Starter Ship Dec 09 2023 Cujo

Hello all

We’re instituting a new Chargen feature, in the form of a free starter ship. If you make a new character, and want to request a free ship once you are IC, then we offer you the newly updated Slingshot cargo hauler.

The new Slingshot comes with 200 tons of cargo space. Max Speeds of 50 MGLT in space, and 80 MGLT in atmosphere. It is still a 1 crew ship, with a bunk behind the pilot’s station, with interior room for 2 passengers to at least sit fiairly comfortably while traveling the space lanes.

In the end, we are now offering free ships out of chargen. If you make a character, and want a ship to start off with, and the new Slingshot variants sound appealing to you, then make that new character, and put in the request once you are approved and IC!

• AoA Staff
  ------------------------------< +bbread 8/218 >-------------------------------

======================<* 7: Game Announcements - 176 *>======================
Message: 7/176 Posted Author
Year End XP Bonus Dec 09 2023 Cujo

Hey all

Throughout the rest of the month, we are offering 1000 XP in bonus for your new characters. If you create a new character, get approved, and want the bonus XP to start fresh and new on the grid, put in a +rquest once you’re IC!

We’ll happily support your new characters leading in to the new year!

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and prepare for 2024!

• Cujo
  ------------------------------< +bbread 7/176 >-------------------------------

The desperation is real. A year ago, any bonuses to new players wouldn’t have passed staff’s laugh test (after all, the pointless gulf between newbies and dinos MUST be maintained!). And new characters who wanted a ship would either have to join an org and hope they felt like loaning a ship out (good luck, Chuck) or go into debt to a crime lord to buy one and hope they could pay off the loan through trading (or outlast the crime lord character, which, given the rate at which players quit AoA, is a weak but viable strategy).

Not that I think this ship’s going to sink much faster. But I got a good lol reading the obvious newbie/alt bait. Makes me wonder if the dinos will demand an equivalent bonus.

@Warma-Sheen Duly noted on the quality thing, and thanks.

@oknow Sadly, no longer so. The game remains open, but activity is largely nil. One fachead has been working hard to make things happen, but I suspect he’s getting burned out.

Also, most of the new arrivals from Jan - Feb seem to have left. Not sure where they’ve gone. A few may be on Rebirth.

@Wuff @Polk You’re both exactly right. While there are commands to keep from flying past or crashing into things you’re trying to reach, they make no actual difference; 99 times out of 100, if you’re running cargo, you’re not RPing.

And that remaining 1 out of 100 is most likely a very slow and laborious scene.

@Kyppi You’re not wrong about the cargo-running. I’ve never seen coded cargo-running promote RP on ANY MUSH I’ve ever played on, but I can tell you from experience that it certainly gets in the way of RP. Especially when you’re stuck on a ship at the corner of No and Where, and nobody’s schedules match up. Which I suppose is convenient if you aren’t interested in RP outside of scheduled events anyway; you always have an excuse to be unavailable. Those stuck on military starships that never seem to make port anywhere have a similar problem, a fact that has (temporarily) killed at least one faction on the game.

You’re not wrong about how demanding the general MUSH community is about RP, either. While there are individual players who are known to be supportive of RP with newbies, most cliques are not, and most orgs qualify as cliques. The handful of exceptions are mostly trying to recruit new members.

Unfortunately, cliques can keep a game running for a very long time without any meaningful influx of new players. SerenityMUSH and AoA are both proof of this.

P.S.: This is probably not my best writing, no thanks to fatigue and illness. Editing may follow.

@Pavel Technically, SerenityMUSH was both run by an idiot AND got people who just wanted to ruin others’ fun playing them. Not the majority, by far. But there were at least three serious problem players who played Feds during the time I played there…

It’s been long enough that I don’t remember the names (I think one might have been named Forge, but I might be wrong). They followed a pretty painful formula; force their way into others’ scenes, powerpose being all stormtrooper-y and ‘YOU WILL RESPECK MY AUTHORITAH!!!’ (misspellings deliberate), and generally walking all over other players 'cause they could. Complaints were pointless, since no pro-player action was ever taken.

Just as an example of how egregious this could get, I once witnessed a major disturbance (I believe there was a bomb involved) that resulted in panicked flight from Eavesdown Docks by everyone in the area. A Fed whose name I can’t remember powerposed stopping everyone passing through at least one of the exits and inspecting everyone’s hands for signs of powder or explosive residue. This at an exit almost as wide as a four-lane street, with panicked people running through like their butts were on fire. Needless to say, no PCs went near that exit, but there were at least two others available, so it didn’t much matter. None of the other PCs responded to this goof’s pose, which was just as well.

On two different occasions a ship I was crewing on decided to host an undercover problem Fed for the purposes of a plot of some kind. At the time I was left wondering just who thought this was a good idea, and in the end things either went as badly as I expected, or worse.

The really pathetic and stupid part of all this is that Mal went above and beyond to empower this handful of problem players (well above and beyond what was allowed for most Fed players), only to turn right around and complain endlessly about the amount of complaints he had to deal with regarding these very same players, and how much of a headache they were for him.

The answer seemed pretty obvious to me (get rid of the problem Fed players!), but apparently not to Mal. Most of those schmucks eventually left when other PCs stopped playing with them.

(Edited for mild clarity)